https://odb.org/MY/2022/04/03/gods-great-love-2
Different ones of us have a different past before we became a believer in Christ. Some who knew Christ in our teenage years have less of a past and yet as we grow up as a Christian, we were probably not perfect and thus have our fair share of our “past” until one day we truly gave and surrendered our lives to God. Of course those who us who got to know Christ much later may have more issues to contend with as we had less to restrain us as we were transitioning into adulthood and even during our days as a working adult with the “freedom” that comes with spending power. Our lives could have been fully motivated to earn as much money as we can, and to only enjoy the good things in life with no regard to God’s will upon our lives since we didn’t know Jesus yet as our personal Saviour and Lord. Not that we are necessarily evil. Just that we had lived on the basis of a different set of rules as set by society and ourselves, and motivated by a different set of intents. We were once ruled by the worldly worldview and perspective. Unfortunately even if that was the past and before we knew God, it had consequences and some of those consequences may be felt even till today after we had accepted Christ. Just as an example and not to generalise, if we had spent a lot of our young adult life picking up girls at clubs and had multiple unprotected sexual encounters with strangers, we may be suffering from STD and some of those have life long effects
Judah was somewhat like that just before the Babylonian invasion. They rebelled against God by worshipping other gods, marrying women from the surrounding nations, plainly doing evil and oppressing the poor and the widows and fatherless. Even as God reminded them through His prophets to turn back to Him, they were insolent – stubborn and rude. So God allowed the Babylonians to overrun them and take them into captivity and became slaves where life is hard and oppressive. And yet in Lamentations 3, we could see that God still loved them and provided them a return path, a way back to Him. As much as God allowed a calamity in the form of an invasion to occur to bring them back to their senses (meaning to say, sin has its consequences), God will still accept them back if they repented and changed their wicked ways.
I always hold on to Joel 2:25 – God’s promise that He will restore to us the years that the locusts had eaten. The consequences of our past sin may have destroyed some of what we used to have. For example, we may not have saved anything from our years of working due to our over-indulgent lifestyle or had made wrong investment decisions in chasing our dream of being rich. Perhaps after 20 years of working, we do not yet have a property or much savings. Whatever that may be, God is able to give us a fresh start even from today onwards. He is able to restore what was lost in the past, heal what was inflicted in the past, even life long diseases if we give our lives to Him, to serve Him for His glory. The Lord is always compassionate and will be moved by our predicament but most likely by our sincere and genuine repentant heart. God is God, we cannot fool Him as He knows us inside out. He has always been compassionate and gracious. Look at how Jesus moved by compassion fed 5,000 from a few loaves of bread and fish. Repent and He will bring us back to the path of righteousness, the path of restoration. We will be made whole again as He will restore to us what the locusts had eaten, had devoured and destroyed over the years. He is after all our God and Father and also the creator of all things! From now on, from today onwards, put our hope and trust in God and in God alone and He will make our paths straight and His Word shall be a lamp unto our feet, a light unto our paths.
Ronnie's Thoughts 